Not true. Hispanics as a group are very conservative, they just don’t vote Republican. This ought to make us question the conservative credentials of the Republican party. In my experience hispanic families I know tend to care a lot more about local social issues to which local Democrats at least pay lip service. That this results in pulling the lever for Ds at the national level is evidence of a well-wrought political machine, not any particularly pro-Democrat feeling on the part of naturalized hispanic families.

Of course that’s no reason to ignore blatant law-breaking or fail to enforce border immigration protocols, and 95% of legal immigrants (not college-educated foreigners with visas, but real immigrants who work real jobs here) will agree completely and are even more put out by illegal immigration than most white Americans. However, both hispanic and asian immigrants tend to also care about their extended families and sending money home or bringing grandma here for a better life trumps political issues. This focus on family and community before state or national politics is of course a hallmark of real conservatism.

But this particular moment in the culture war (like several others in the recent past, I’ll admit) intersects both the symptom and the disease. The symptom: a purge over heretical beliefs about gays. But unlike the contraception case over at Hobby Lobby, this case involves someone who is clearly a civilization-builder, a man who epitomizes the old mantra “optimize for intelligence.” The guy created fucking Javascript. Do you have any idea how much that one language has helped propel online commerce and general internet usability?

Eich isn’t some redneck who got lucky in dry goods. He’s a valuable, high-IQ asset who has proven himself to be among the best in his field. The fact that a company is so willing to throw this asset out the window in order to be morally pure . . . this is, in many ways, an epitome of the NRx critique.

(I continue to be of the mind that gays should have been on our side. Christ’s sake, can you picture anything more elitist than a fop in a Dolce and Gabanna store? If the Right had said, from the beginning, Yeah, here’s your civil unions, comes with all the rights associated with marriage . . . if we had done that, this would never have turned into one of the fronts of the culture wars.)

Each right in question can be expected to bring its own crusade, animal marriage, abortion rights, animal property rights, animal voting rights, animal gay marriage rights… These crusades form an open class; for any VERB there is a function expressing RIGHT TO ‘(VERB, X), where X is the minority group in question.

RIGHT TO ‘(VOTE, X [- HUMAN] [- HETEROSEXUAL] [- ABLE BODIED])

Then again, I’ve spent lots of time playing various Japanese square-based puzzles (Sudoku, Heyawake, Nurikabe, Lights Out, etc.), which all seem to be generally derived from Go concepts, so I probably have a head start.